I can dream my future, I can feel my nature
by eevilalice
Summary: Lou and Nina are a match, hunger for hunger. (Louis Bloom/Nina Romina)


Written for Yuletide 2015, a gift for warriorpoet.

This film and relationship are fucked up; therefore, so is this fic. Warnings include dubious consent and sexual coercion, with some breathplay (erotic asphyxiation).

XXXXX

The first time they fuck, Nina rides Lou hard on her couch minutes after walking through the door. To make him come fast. To get it over with.

But he doesn't leave after, just looks around her apartment with that sociopathic boy scout smile, asking her questions about journalism and broadcasting awards she won years ago when she was fresh, hungry but not yet ravenous.

Then he wants to do it again.

He leads her to her own bedroom and removes her clothes while she stands there like a mannequin. He compliments her skin tone, fitness, even her posture in his learned-from-the-internet recital voice.

He cages her with his body on the bed. He stares at her the whole time, big eyes in a cavernous, insatiate face. His eyes are blue but dark, opaque; you can't see into them, only feel what he sees into you. She turns her head away on the pillow, then gasps when he finds her clit with his fingers. She fights the pleasure as he explores her body with mouth, hands, and cock, and it's too late; he's learned what she likes. What her body likes without her consent.

 _I'm a hard worker. I'm a quick learner._

She comes, then runs to the bathroom to throw up what little Mexican food she ate.

. . . . .

After he fails her the first and only time, she refuses him.

"You're not holding up your end of the deal," she spits, finger stabbing the accusation at the air.

He moves forward, smooth and feral, like an animal that's trained itself, the training a put-on for its prey. "This is a working partnership. There are bound to be ups and downs. I just hadn't accounted for all the factors influencing the market, but once I do, I'll develop a strategy…"

"Oh, fuck your strategies!" She kicks her heels off and stalks into the kitchen, grabs a bottle of vodka from the freezer. She eyes the steak knife lying near the sink.

"I understand, I understand," he repeats, a new tension in his frame. "But our relationship is ongoing. It can't just be quit. It can't be quit."

"'Relationship,'" she mutters, splashing some vodka into a glass from the dish drain. "Well then, consider yourself in the fucking doghouse."

"Nina."

She shakes her head, glares at the clear liquid in her glass. Tosses it back and appreciates the burn.

"Nina. Nina, take off your clothes."

She looks up, disbelieving. He's entered the kitchen.

 _This little shit._

His voice is all calm, teleprompter tones. "Nina, take off your clothes. I'll show you that you can trust me. I am a reliable person." His body vibrates with taut energy, and his eyes are black and sheened.

Nina is not easily intimidated. Almost thirty years in broadcast journalism have wrung fear and insecurity right out of her. Yet her fingers place the glass on the counter, stray to her blouse buttons.

Closer and closer he moves. "It was one bad night, Nina. One bad night is not enough to fracture our good working relationship. I trust you; now you trust me." He watches her shrug out of her blouse and bra, peel off her skirt, thigh high stockings, and underwear. He picks up the stockings.

"It's okay that you're disappointed, but I believe this bump in the road will only strengthen our partnership." He slides the nylon through his hands and nods in the direction of her bedroom. Her face is hot but composed as she turns and walks to her room. She doesn't know if she obeys because of his rote rationality or the black opacity of his eyes. She thinks really it's a strange sort of defiance on her part, an insistence that she's not threatened by him.

"Lie down." She does. Still clothed, he straddles her vulnerable frame and brings the nylon to her neck.

"No." She smacks his hand away, no longer compliant. "Get the fuck off me with that."

"Nina, you need to do this. It's the only way you'll know you can trust me."

"Bullshit." She pushes at his chest, digs her nails into the cheap fabric of his shirt. "Get the fuck off _now_."

His jaw and gaze tighten, and her throat constricts in response. For a moment real fear seizes her; he's not going to stop.

Instead, he nods, keeps nodding as he climbs off. "I'm disappointed," he says, walking out of the room, out of her apartment.

Later she finds the stockings trampled on the floor in the entryway. She throws them away.

. . . . .

Nina dreams she's in a car wreck, whiplashed, twisted metal squeezing her like a piece of overripe fruit.

She dreams a dark figure breaks into her apartment, slashes her satiny nightgown to shreds, blood spatter on the walls, wounds gaping.

And Lou is there with his camera. He tells her it'll be a great piece, wants $50,000 for it.

She smiles, lips and teeth red with blood, as ratings tick away in her head, and she wakes up.

. . . . .

After "Horror House," he tries nylons again, and she lets him.

She gazes up at him, the soft, cutting fabric around her throat, and the whites of his eyes gleam in the low light. Her muscles strain, and her vision darkens. Tighter and tighter he pulls the ligature, harder and faster he fucks into her, and she's flying, riding the wave of pulses in her core as he watches. She gasps once as he comes and loosens the nylons from her neck, then passes out.

When she wakes who knows how much later, he's still looking at her from the other side of the bed. "I think I should spend the night," he says.

She nods.

. . . . .

 _Amazing. Amazing._

The word keeps up a steady refrain in her head as she leaves the station, Frank's narrow-minded moralism dwindling in her afterglow. She's winning; she's won. The station will renew her contract, they'll give her a raise, more power. She'd forgotten what ambition looks like, what it feels like, until Lou.

He'll do anything. Anything. And no judgment.

She heads home and thinks to text Lou but knows it's unnecessary. She pours two glasses of red wine from a bottle he bought the other night and sits on her couch. She checks herself with her cell phone camera, running fingers through her hair, reapplying lipstick. Her eyes are nice and dark.

He arrives, enters without knocking, and she smiles, red lips. She feels everything in her open up like a giant mouth.

Nina knows it isn't love; it's something better. It's herself, her hunger. Lou's perfect ambition the liquid that burns her throat, fills her eyes again.

He stands before her, and she looks up.

No more negotiating.


End file.
